Abstract
When plague struck Marseilles, France, in 1720, lines of communication for Londoners were free and effective enough by way of printed materials that citizens could track the rise of the disease in an array of documents. Sparking worry of an outbreak in London and jolting memories of the city’s dire affliction in 1665, plague on the continent drove Londoners to consider the information available to them to fend off and manage another epidemic in the metropolis. With Londoners clamouring for information about plague, Defoe published A Journal of the Plague Year, a text that brought readers back to 1665. Though published in 1722, 57 years following the 1665 plague in London, A Journal of the Plague Year exists as a testament to the opportunities afforded by early modern print culture to compiling and narrating a story of the illness. Even decades following the outbreak itself—Defoe was only a child in 1665—he was able to narrate a convincing image of the plague.
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Notes
- 1.
Research Fellowships at the Worth Library. edwardworthlibrary.ie/research-fellowships/. Accessed 22 October 2016.
- 2.
Charles Davis, Catalogue of Choice and Valuable Books in Most Faculties and Languages; Being the Sixth Part of the Collection Made by Tho. Rawlinson (London: [1726]). (Davis 1726)
- 3.
Achinstein, ‘Plagues and Publication’, p. 34. (Achinstein 1992)
- 4.
Though these were connected, there were, of course, struggles between physicians and religious figures, Wear, ‘Puritan Perceptions of Illness in Seventeenth Century England’, pp. 69-70. (Wear 1985)
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- 7.
Wear, ‘Puritan Perceptions of Illness in Seventeenth Century England’, p. 55. (Wear 1985)
- 8.
Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 4.
- 9.
Thomson, Loimotomia, pp. 77–78. (Thomson 1966)
Bibliography
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Achinstein, Sharon. 1992. Plagues and Publication: Ballads and the Representation of Disease in the English Renaissance. Criticism 34.1: 27–49.
Gilman, Ernest. 2011. Afterword: Plague and Metaphor. In Representing the Plague in Early Modern England, ed. Rebecca Totaro and Ernest B. Gilman, 219–236 (225). New York: Routledge.
Houlbrooke, Ralph. 2000. Death, Religion and the Family in England, 1480–1750. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wear, Andrew. 1985. Puritan Perceptions of Illness in Seventeenth Century England. In Patients and Practitioners: Lay Perceptions of Medicine in Pre-Industrial Society, 55–100. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Miller, K. (2016). Conclusion: Recalling the Plague of 1665 in Later Literary Culture. In: The Literary Culture of Plague in Early Modern England. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51057-0_8
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